The BEST Pacific Northwest Snow Report Website

http://carismata.com/snowreports A great summary of Crystal, Stevens, Mt Baker, Whistler, and Alpental. Works very well from Windows Powered Smartphones and Pocket PCs. I’ve been using this since early last season and it’s just great. Below is a live pic of Steven’s Pass. When I posted this it was snowing…what’s it doing now?

Best optical illusion yet?

Mike Hall posted probably the best optical illusion I’ve ever seen. Wow. In the same spirit of ridiculous humor he says I used to be one of his heros  (although I think he was being serious).

Car Blogs

I’m a car nut. For the last 7 years my passion has been about my ’88 Porsche 911 Carrera coupe and my ’95 BMW 540 M-Sport 6-Speed. It’s high time I started posting the occasional blog entires about my cars. You’ll find these posts under the Car category… While reading posts on the M-Sport mailing list I noticed that Ren Finley, another M-Sport fanantic (Ren’s a bit more of a purist than me so he …Continue reading

My motherboard died

Nothing’s free. Ain’t it true. A while back I wrote that I had received a free Epox 8KDA3+ mobo and Athlon 3700+ CPU and that I was building a new workstation at home around it. Well I built it, and it was working fine. Mostly. I had a few weird crashes that I thought I had resolved by going to the latest GeForce video drivers. Some problems were resolved, but I still had some odd …Continue reading

My team

Chris Gray on my team is playing with IIS at home. He’s got a little moblog app that automatically takes pics from his PocketPC phone and uploads them. This pic was taken right before we had an executive review for our project. Charlie, Chris, Sergey, Todd, Lee…  

Community Server Beta One

Community Server (formerly .Text) Beta One has finally been released. I’m downloading and installing it now at work to use as an internal team blog. I love .Text and can’t wait to see how Scott has improved things in this new version.

Crazy expensive home server

Sheesh. I thought Linux devices were supposed to be cheaper… Engadget writes about the Niveus A/V Storage Server which is basically just a Linux based NAS box with 1TB of RAID 5 storage in it. I can’t even tell if it actually supports SMB or not. Sure it’s pretty and fanless but why does it cost $3K? If you think this box sounds cool to you, I suggest you instead consider what you could do …Continue reading

Killer home server deal

Slickdeals.com is showing that you can now get a DELL PowerEdge SC420 P4-2.8GHz, 80GB system for $289+tax w/free shipping. These SC series machines from DELL make great home servers. They are plenty powerful, expandable, and amazingly very quiet.

How Many Gadgets Do You Carry?

Furrygoat asks how many gadgets people carry. Seems like his model is similar to mine. I carry a SmartPhone (I have the new Audiovox SMT 5600 which I just love), a 16MB USB keychain (hooked to my Microsoft card key), and when at work I carry my Acer C110TCi Tablet PC to and from meetings. In my car I hava a Jabra Bluetooth wireless headset. At the gym I use a Rio Cali Sport portable audio …Continue reading

A File Server…in Your Living Room?

Via BusinessWeek a good article on home servers: That’s right, with most homes nowadays having multiple computers and lots of files to share, these new low-cost devices can do wonders Want to watch movies, control your stereo’s music, and back up your computer files from any PC in the house? A cheap server computer, a scaled-down version of the pricey machines locked away in corporate data centers, might be the best way to manage your family’s …Continue reading

Polar Bears win it all!

The girls did it! We won the LWYSA Girls U-11 championship today, beating the Cougars 2-1. We also beat the Cougars yesterday 3-1 (the Cougars then won the bottom bracket by beating the Shooting Stars this morning). In fine fashion the girls had prepared a jug of water and let me have it after the game. What a blast!

Polar Bears win the Sportsmanship Award!

The Polar Bears won the sportsmanship award for U-11 Girls Division 1 Soccer!!!! We came out on top, BY A LARGE MARGIN. But the summary is the Polar Bears got 206 points and the next team got 174 (the Illusion). As a reward, LWYSA pays for a party at Illusionz. Even if we don’t win the Tournament, I view this as complete victory. When the season started I told the parents and the girls we …Continue reading

Polar Bears are one game away

I coach my daughter’s soccer team (11 year olds) in the Lake Washington Youth Soccer Association (LWYSA). The team name is the Polar Bears and these girls are amazing! I am blessed to have such a great bunch of girls on the team. They all have great attitudes, work hard, and more importantly play hard. This weekend we won all three of their games in the LWYSA Year End Tournament. They beat the Wind 4-1, …Continue reading

Visual Studio 2005 + PUM == danger

We’re busy doing a bunch of prototyping on my double-super-secret project at work and I decide I need to chip in and help. I haven’t used Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) yet, so I figure I’d build a little app we need using it. I sat down Wednesday night and started hammering away… Not a complex app, basically a single winform app with about 30 controls used to create configuration files that another component the team …Continue reading

New Windows PC Form Factors

It’s going to be very interesting over the next few years as OEMs begin to finally produce truly innovative new PC form factors focused on specific user scenarios. Neowin.net points out that a British OEM, Scan Computers, has launched the “Project PC”, a PC specifically targeted at project managers who make heavy use of Microsoft Project. We’ve already seen great innovation in small form factor (SFF) desktop machines such as those from Shuttle. And great …Continue reading

Lunar Eclipse – Wow!

I was driving the kids home tonight and we saw the Lunar Ecilpse. When we first saw it the Earth had cast a shadow across about 75% of the moon. We raced home so we could get out the binoculars and take a closer look before it was completely “red”. We got home in plenty of time and while we watched the Red Sox win the World Series saw it get really dark and then …Continue reading

How to Build a PC for the future

ExtremeTech has a great article full of advice on bulding a PC today that can be upgraded in the future. Their general advice is “don’t build yesterday’s PC but instead bet on the new standards like PCI Express”. Matches my opinion exactly. Of course, when I built the PC I’m typing this on about a month ago I ignored my own advice…with good reason: I really needed a new PC and the “next generation stuff” really wasn’t …Continue reading

In depth MCE 2005 article on AnandTech

AnandTech has a very deep article on Windows Media Center Edition 2005. They didn’t think much of the earlier versions of MCE. Some quotes: “Media Center Edition continues to be the coolest looking highest performance PVR/DVR (with a fast enough system) out there on the market today. The interface continues to be clearly ahead of the competition…”“In the end, MCE continues to be a niche product, but if you have the means, then its definitely one …Continue reading

Media Center SDK on MSDN

Via Ethan Zoller, the Media Center 2005 SDK is now on MSDN. http://msdn.microsoft.com/mce. Via this I also discoved Michael Creasy’s blog which focuses on MCE. Cool.

Mount St. Helens Photos

Via Furrygoat, I found a great USGS website with tons of really good pictures of Mount St. Helens. Definitely worth checking out. When I see these photos I’m reminded of two things: How gawd-awful the pictures of the 1980 eruption were and this amazing Earth that God created.